This year has been pretty great; Nintendo introduced us to the 3DS, we saw Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 duke it out for gamers' hearts and cash, and we got to play some of the most critically acclaimed games of all time. Titles like The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, Batman: Arkham City, Portal 2, and Dead Space 2 received near unanimous acclaim while taking many of us away from any semblance of a social life we might've once had. With all this greatness, the only real way to divide it up and make it all seem a little more manageable is with lists, and this year we've had an abundance of those. Here are Cheat Code Central's best lists of 2011.

In an industry this large and competitive, too many games fly under the radar or get swept under the carpet. They might be incredible, unique, and insanely fun, but because of marketing, a niche fan base, or a plethora of other potential reasons, sometimes good games just don't get the attention they deserve. This is why this list is great, because it rounds up some of the best games that you may have missed this year, and all of them are worth checking out.

Just as some games receive too little attention, there are titles on the opposite side of the spectrum that have way too much hype surrounding them. This can be because of a big budget (Call of Duty, Gears of War), years of anticipation (Duke Nukem Forever, Alan Wake), or even the clout of the team behind it (Valve, Blizzard). But sometimes a game simply can't live up to the hype surrounding it. This is our list of the games that didn't quite meet our lofty expectations.

As video games continue to strive for the level of respect that the film industry receives, the stories and characters in our worlds of bits, bytes, pixels, and sprites continue to evolve. It's crazy to think that only a decade ago, we didn't need any story or character development in a game; instead, it was all about the gameplay. While that's still crucial today, developers are starting to give us more and more titles that have stories, visuals, and casts that rival the best of what Hollywood has to offer. Unfortunately, many developers are still struggling to figure this out. This list brings together the good, the bad, and the unintentionally funny.

Resident Evil 5 is a great example of a game we thought would be incredible yet failed to live up to the high bar set by its predecessor. All it had to do was build off of what Resident Evil 4 did, maybe make the co-op optional, and stick to the action/horror rather than full-on Michael Bay-style explosions and cheesy dialogue. Instead, it was short, frustrating, and largely forgettable. Oh, and other disappointing sequels made this list too.

This list doesn't collect the best boss fights or the most unforgettable boss fights or anything like that; these are the most epic boss fights in the history of gaming. By "epic" we mean impossibly gigantic or destructive. There are bosses on this list that could destroy cities—and in some cases, the entire world—without breaking a sweat. From the Riftworm encounter of Gears of War 3 to one of my personal favorites, the final Colossus in Shadow of the Colossus, these baddies are so massive in scale and/or power that we wouldn't dream of taking them on in real life. Any gamer worth their salt has undoubtedly experienced a wave of satisfaction and confidence after vanquishing a particularly tough boss, but it's these outstandingly epic bosses that feel the greatest when they finally go down.